Great Tales From English History (13 page)

What happened next is a mystery. According to one tradition, King William forgave the outlaw on account of his gallantry. That does not sound like the Conqueror, particularly after resistance that had cost him such expense and difficulty. The alternative story has Hereward betrayed into the hands of cowardly Norman assassins who stabbed him in the back with their lances. Either way, the Wake passed rapidly from history into legend. We do not know how long he lived or how he died, but within a generation or so the tales about him had been gathered into a Latin story book entitled
Gesta Herwardi Incliti Exulis et Militis
- ‘The Exploits of Hereward the Celebrated Outlaw and Soldier’.

Starting from a grain of truth, the
Gesta Herwardi
expanded into yarns of wild fantasy that seem to have found a wide audience among both Normans and Saxons, many of whom would have listened to the tales as they were read aloud in Latin, or retold in instant translation. The plot lines followed some eternal stereotypes. In one exciting episode, Hereward returns to his family home to discover it full of Normans, with the head of his younger brother stuck on a pole beside the gate. In the style of Ulysses - or indeed of Ratty, Mole and Badger when they recapture Toad Hall from the wicked weasels and stoats - Hereward sneaks back into the house that night while the Normans are celebrating, and takes them by surprise. With the aid of just one follower, he kills the new lord and fifteen of his companions, cuts off
their
heads, and sticks them all up on poles where he found his brother’s.

This was adventure fiction at its best - sheer wish fulfilment. But it was nonetheless popular for that, one imagines, when recounted around the firesides of the Anglo-Saxons.

AD 1086

B
Y 1085 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR WAS
nearly sixty, and he had long since settled into an annual routine. When he was in England he usually spent Easter at Winchester, the old capital of Wessex, which remained his working headquarters. For the Whitsun holiday he went to London, already the hub of English trade and on its way to becoming the country’s capital; and he liked to celebrate Christmas in Gloucester, the old Mercian settlement on the border of Wales. William had ruled England for the best part of twenty years, and now, around New Year’s Day 1086, it was time to take stock. Let the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
take up the story:

The king had much thought and very deep discussion with his council about this country - how it was settled, and with what kind of people. Then he sent his men all over England, into every shire, and had them find out how many hides [units of land] there were in the shire, or what land and cattle the king himself had in the country, or what dues [tax] he ought to have each year.

The Norman Conquest has been described in today’s terms as a ‘corporate takeover’. Twenty to thirty thousand Normans, a comparatively small number, became the new managers and controllers of the two million or so Anglo-Saxons and Danes who inhabited England. Modern managers take over a company’s accounting system. The Normans took over the land - and now William wanted to know ‘what or how much everyone who was in England had’.

The result of this countrywide investigation was the Domesday Book, so nicknamed by the native English as a sort of put-down, a resentful joke. William’s great survey invaded everyone’s lives, winkling out their secrets, they complained. Like God’s Day of Judgement, it left people helpless in the face of such total knowledge, with no hope of appeal.

The book contained nine hundred pages of hand-written Latin - some two million words - describing more than thirteen thousand places in England and some parts of Wales, all examined in the most extraordinary detail. ‘So very strictly did [William] have it investigated,’ wrote the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, ‘that not a yard of land, nor indeed one ox nor one cow nor one pig was left out.’ Leaving us in no doubt about their Anglo-Saxon origins, the monks added a sarcastic footnote: ‘Shame it is to relate, but it seemed no shame to him to do.’

These critical monks understood the bottom line. Domesday was all about control and money. William had taken possession of all England, every square inch of it. As far back as anyone could remember, the Anglo-Saxons had held and farmed their land in a variety of ways. But now nobody owned land without obligations to the King: they held it as William’s tenant, and had to pay for the privilege with ‘service’, which could take the form of a basket of eggs, some chickens, bacon, honey, a barrel of herrings, money, or supplying armed soldiers when the King called for war.

Many centuries later this system became known as ‘feudalism’, from the medieval Latin
feudum
, meaning ‘fee’ or ‘payment’. The economist Adam Smith first coined the phrase the ‘feudal system’ in 1776 - long after feudalism itself was dead - and it has been talked about in high-flown, almost philosophical terms. In practice, it was the crude means whereby William and the Normans shared out England among themselves. It was a land-grab. Domesday makes clear that by 1087 all the major landholders were Normans or French - the original group of investors. The Anglo-Saxons had been cut out of the picture. If they held land at all it was as tenants to the invaders.

It is now more than nine hundred years since the English experienced subjugation: taking orders from people who don’t speak your language, being forced to pay for land you thought you owned, and probably having some of your relatives killed into the bargain. There was one law for the Normans and another for the natives. William’s laws gave special protection to ‘all the men I have brought with me, or who have come after me’.

This legal discrimination is reflected in the language that we speak today, a mixture of Anglo-Saxon or
englisc
, and Norman French. Our modern English words of control and authority - ‘order’, ‘police’, ‘court’, ‘judge’, ‘trial’, ‘sentence’, ‘prison’, ‘punishment’, ‘execution’ - all come from Norman French. And there is a similar linguistic apartheid in the way we describe food. When it came to the hard work of rearing and tending the animals, the words used were English - cow
(cu)
, pig (
pigge
), sheep (
sceap
). When it came to eating them, they were French - beef (
boeuf
), pork
(porc)
, mutton (
mouton
). It is not hard to see who produced the fruits of the earth, and who enjoyed them.

You can see the Domesday Book today in the airy glass and concrete National Archives building in Kew in south-west London. It is England’s oldest public record, and anyone can go and look at it. The first known legal dispute that used the great document as evidence occurred in the 1090s, almost as soon as it was completed, and Domesday still has legal authority when it comes to the ownership of English land. For centuries it was kept in a rat-proof iron chest. Now it is carefully preserved, in four volumes, in an air-conditioned, shatterproof glass case.

The parchment looks soft, almost pinkish, the ink faded to brown with people’s names picked out in rusty red. Here is Leofgyth, a Saxon woman of Knook in Wiltshire, ‘who made and still makes gold embroideries for the king and queen’. We can trace the size of the estates that Godgifu, Lady Godiva, owned in Worcestershire at the beginning of January 1066, ‘the day King Edward lived and died’. And here are the details of the land held by the troublesome Hereward before he fled in 1071.

The Domesday Book is living history. To start with, the massive survey was known as ‘The King’s Roll’ or ‘The Winchester Book’, reflecting where it was made and stored. But within less than a century it had come to be known officially by its rude English nickname, and has remained so ever since. The Anglo-Saxons might have lost the land for the time being, but they had the last word on it.

AD 1100

K
ING WILLIAM I DIED AS HE HAD LIVED
- a-conquering. In the high summer of 1087 he led his troops to punish the town of Mantes on the River Seine, which had dared to send a raiding party into Norman territory. As the Normans torched Mantes, some burning object caused William’s horse to rear up in fright. Now sixty years old, the Conqueror was grossly overweight, and as his horse lurched backwards the high pommel at the front of his battle-saddle was driven into his soft belly, puncturing his intestines. Bleeding internally, the King was carried away to die, and as the priests gathered round him he set about disposing of his empire.

William had three sons, and he didn’t think much of any of them. Ridiculing the short stature of his eldest, Robert, he had nicknamed him ‘Curthose’ (Short-stockings) or ‘Jamberons’ (Stubby-legs), and he had not been on speaking terms with him for years. William saw no way of preventing Robert becoming Duke of Normandy, because of the Norman rule of primogeniture. But for England he picked his second son, William Rufus, and from his deathbed the old man sent Rufus riding hard towards the Channel. To his third son Henry he presented a huge sum of money, five thousand pounds of silver, which Henry set about counting there and then so as to make sure he had not been short-changed.

Before he breathed his last, William ordered his prisoners-of-war to be freed and gifts of money to be made to selected churches - his admission fee to heaven. But as his followers rode off to secure their property ahead of the conflict that they could sense coming between the two elder sons, his servants plundered his personal possessions. The final indignity came when the gases that had accumulated in the Conqueror’s rotting, corpulent body exploded - it had been forced into a coffin that was too small for it.

Usually respected, often feared, William the Conqueror had never been loved, and William Rufus was to rule in his father’s tradition. He got his name, William the Red, from his florid complexion, which the superstitious saw as symbolising blood and fire. Historians disagree as to whether his hair was ginger or flaxen yellow, but there is no doubt about his complexion - red, the witches’ colour - and William played up to this by sneering openly at religion. Why should he pray to God, he once asked after suffering a severe illness, since God had caused him such pain and trouble? When senior churchmen - abbots and bishops - died, Rufus blocked the appointment of a successor, so he could take over their lands and keep the income for himself. It was scarcely surprising that the churchmen who wrote the history of the times should have given him a bad press. On the basis of their criticisms, William the Red has gone down in history as one of England’s ‘bad’ kings.

In fact, he ruled England quite effectively, if harshly, in the Norman style. He defeated the attempts of his elder brother Robert Curthose to claim England, taking the battle to Robert in Normandy. In London William built ambitiously, constructing the first stone bridge over the River Thames, and a huge banqueting hall down the river in Edward the Confessor’s Palace of Westminster.

Westminster Hall stands to this day, and is the most ancient section of the Houses of Parliament. The tall and echoing hall was the home of the law courts for centuries and, since 1910, the place where dead kings and queens lie in state. In April 2002 some two hundred thousand mourners queued for hours to file silently through William Rufus’s nine-hundred-year-old banqueting hall to pay their last respects at the coffin of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

The Red King loved hunting. It was a passion with all the Norman monarchs, and a deep source of grievance to their English subjects. More than seventy forests around England were eventually to be designated royal hunting preserves where special forest laws were fiercely enforced by the King’s foresters and ‘wood-wards’. Anyone caught hunting deer, boar or other game there was punished with blinding or mutilation. You could be punished just for carrying a bow and arrow. People inside the royal forest areas, which included open fields and whole villages, were not allowed to keep dogs, unless the animal had been disabled from hunting by having three digits cut from one of its front paws. These are the years when rabbits and pheasants first appeared in England, introduced by the Normans to add to their hunting pleasures. But for Saxon farmers these new arrivals, like the royal deer, were simply crop-consuming pests.